The story of my hair'less' adventures
An ordinary man's account of mid-life degeneration
It was while I was in sixth grade that I really looked at my hair closely. The boys in school had started calling me ‘porcupine’. Some said that my head looked like a missile launcher. Some mean ones even called me a ‘toilet brush’; you know, the spiky type. While everyone had semi-straight hair, wavy hair or curly hair, I had thick black stick-straight hair. It would seem that nothing could bring it down.
But I knew that it was an illusion, an evil trick nature played on a majority of the men folk. Male-pattern hair loss was looming large upon me. The men in my family had been challenged on our head hair follicles for several generations. I had witnessed only two. But I had photographs of older generations as evidence.
As I moved through university and early career days, I was rocking it. My hair had become more pliable; nevertheless, it symbolized the fullness of life and fecundity. It was like a field glorious with vibrant and untamed shafts of wheat swaying in the wind.
My mid-thirties were when I noticed that the season for harvest was fast approaching. A receding hairline at the front corners was how it all started. It soon resembled the alphabet ‘M’, a condition popularly called ‘Widow’s Peak’. I want to say that it still looked formidable and respectable — a la Gary Cooper.
After I turned forty, things took a turn for the worse quite swiftly. I remember returning from a barbershop thinking my man did not do a good job at the crown (top of the back) of my head. He had left a tuft untouched. I reached my hand to the back and kept ruffling it between my fingers, quite upset that he left that patch over there. I usually had stiff and firm hair, but this was plumy and soft. On getting home, I took out my hair trimmer, quite annoyed, to finish the job.
Since it was at the crown, I needed my wife’s help in reviewing the fruit of my labour. She looked at my hair before I started trimming and commented, “Viv, I don’t see a problem here. The length kinda looks fine.” After some reasoning (and a few of her chuckles), I figured that my hair had started thinning at the rear thus making it feel soft to the touch. I had assumed that it was the longishness of my hair which made it softer. Well, this was a big shift. Things were happening to me. To make matters worse, I could not even see it now.
And then it was like dominoes falling after that. The hair on the top also started thinning. It turned out that every time I went to the barbershop, I had to debate with him how my hair should be cut. “The baldness can be cleverly covered”, he would confidently argue. And I insisted that he cut it the same way (some form of crew cut) as I always had him do. I was in no way going to buckle under his or anybody else’s gaze.
When I returned home from the barber shop, I would be the subject of deep family discussions. My wife would claim that I changed my hairstyle altogether. And I would insist that it was the same haircut. The only difference was that with each visit to the barbershop now, there were tectonic shifts occurring on the follicular real estate which made the same cut appear amusingly different afterwards. I couldn’t help it. The barber was getting frustrated because there were only so many tricks he had up his sleeve. And my family liked roasting me because I was now looking like a clown.
When I went to Kerala over this summer, my bald dad looked at me with glee. He didn’t have to say a word. I knew what was on his mind. Friends would comment heartily saying, “style aage mariyallo!” (“your style has altogether changed, huh!”). And relatives started whispering that I started to look like my dad.
A week ago, now in my mid-forties, I went to the barbershop for a haircut and experienced the same debates at the shop and at home. The barber wanted to attempt another creative intervention to hide the emerging baldness. And my wife claimed that, yet again, I changed my haircut, pulling out her phone to click the image (below) and prove her point. In the middle of these civil disputes, I had a moment of luminous clarity. Nothing less than an enlightenment.
I didn’t see a point in holding on to some aspiration that whatever remained of my hair would stay on. Nope, it was all going to go away. And that too soon. So, I announced to my wife and kids that I was going to get a ‘buzz cut’ (image below) and keep it that way henceforth. My kids wailed, “No, PAPA, NOOOOO!”. But my wife agreed with a vigorous nod of her head saying, “Yes, that’s better than this!”, pointing her hand to my head, and thrusting the image at my face again.
So, I set out yesterday to take the path of many luminaries before me. This includes the likes of Dalai Lama and Gandhi (peace legends), Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson (action heroes), Churchill and Putin (fierce politicians of war), Bezos and Domenica Dolce (businessmen), Jordan and Zidane (sportsmen), Phil Collins and Satriani (musicians), Darwin and Foucault (intellectuals), and of course, the inimitable style icon, Sean Connery.
As much as I am relieved, I am also at a loss because I had some fun headshots taken which are rendered irrelevant now. My wife had taken the picture which is proudly plastered on Substack with the logo. That was eight years ago. More recently, I had a professional headshot taken by a friend (Jordan Ervin, founder of The Story Company) some months ago which could and should have gotten more mileage. It now looks like the person on my Linkedin profile is a man trying hard to immortalize one last look with hair on. Well, until I meet Jordan again, and if he continues to be charitable to this soul, I intend on keeping it that way.
Thank you Vivek, for sharing your journey of self-realization, acceptance, and evolution. I appreciate the humor and introspection you weave into your writing. Your writing is so relatable!